Touchstone's Editors and Allies on News and Events of the Day

November 24, 2009

Secularism and Polytheism

A colleague offered me the following piece of correspondence from the Financial Times. It is a letter written by Dr. Gautam Pingle, who serves as a dean with the College of India. He writes:

Sir,

[unimportant first para deleted] Intolerance bred by the monotheism of the People of the Book -- mostly Christian and Muslim -- in their mutual and conflicting wars and quest for world domination embroiled mankind in hatred and maasacres of each other and "the other" over the past 1,700 years. Even today, we see the baleful effects of residual monotheism and its apocalyptic vision.

Fortunately, in some parts of this troubled planet, the polytheistic tendency, with its signal notion encouraging inclusion, seems to be gaining ground and legitimacy -- after its long nightmare -- in the guise of secularism.

I find it fascinating that this writer equates polytheism with secularism. An interesting thought.

It is provocative enough for me to ask people to read my own in depth investigation of secularism (The End of Secularism) and to encourage my fellow academics, analysts, cultural researchers, etc. to join me in the project of scholarly work about secularism. There is much to do and we only gain in the course of civil confrontation.

4 Comments

Intolerance bred by the monotheism of the People of the Book -- mostly Christian and Muslim -- in their mutual and conflicting wars and quest for world domination embroiled mankind in hatred and maasacres of each other and "the other" over the past 1,700 years.

Guess there are no Hindu terrorists in India. I wonder what the last bunch of Christians persecuted over there would say.

Aztecs, Assyrians, Babylonians, Canaanites, Goths, Vikings...No massacres or intolerance there. No human sacrifice or wars of conquest where they invoked the greatness of their gods. Christianity was persecuted by pagan Romans for the better part of the first four centuries of its existence. Even Islam was at first persecuted.

Even today, we see the baleful effects of residual monotheism and its apocalyptic vision.

Ragnarok, anyone?

Yeah, just war theory, rule of law, limited government, Natural Rights, constitutionalism, international law, the scientific method. And let's not mention institutions like the International Red Cross or things like the Geneva Convention.

The intolerance of the English ended the practice of throwing wives on funeral pyres and helped to chip away at your lamentable caste system. The only reason you're a dean of a university is because they imported the university system that the Christian West created. Christian civilization was the first to extinguish our institutions of slavery.

India produced Buddha, who even with his humaneness in response to the harshness of Hinduism, answered by rejecting reality and extinguishing the self in an act of supreme annihilation. And Hinduism? You believe in an unknowable, impenetrable god in which all things--the good, as well as the evil--are ultimately a part of him and into which all things will return into him in the same sort of act of self-extinguishing, after a nearless endless cycle of reincarnation. Aside from the fact that that is far more apocalyptic than my faith has ever been, you can't even answer the evil of this world.

My God is a God who loves, who diminished himself into the form of a man and died the death of a criminal to take the sin of his creatures upon him and reconcile all to himself. My God is renewing this world from its brokenness and reclaiming it from its corruption. Your god will one day wipe this world away like a bad dream. My faith is wrathful against the darkness. Yours sinks ever deeper into it. Mine has produced changes never before seen in human history. Yours didn't change until the intolerance of mine dragged it into the light.

India didn't produce Gandhi until the English, with their Christian intolerance, changed it. And Gandhi depended upon the Christian decency of the English as he pricked their conscience. In the end, it was that same Christian humaneness that allowed the English to let go of India, instead of salting your soil and carrying off your women and children in chains.

David Marcoe makes excellent points. The Hinduism most people know today is a watered-down "Methodist" variety in which the most objectionable elements were suppressed by the British--often by force or the threats of force. The story of how Charlie Napier ended the practice of Suttee (the forced immolation of Hindu widows on their husbands' pyres) is well known. He was told that Suttee was an ancient ancestral tradition of the Hindu people, and its suppression would give offense. He replied, "My people, too, have an ancient custom: if a man burns a woman alive, we hang him. You shall build your funeral pyre; next to it, we shall build a gallows. Let each people act according to their custom".

The "tolerance" of the Hindus is much overrated, as members of the ancient Christian Mar Thoma Churches can attest. In addition to their intolerance of outsiders, they habitually oppress their own members based upon caste, and women based upon sex. It says something that Hinduism sometimes makes Islam seem enlightened.

Buddhism can hardly be called a religion at all, but the best description I ever heard of it was "spiritual masturbation". Hesychia and other forms of Christian mysticism tap into many of the same threads and psychosomatic exercises, but unlike the Nirvana of the Buddha, the Christian unity of all-in-all in Christ does not require annihilation of the self, but rather the fullest realization of the self.